Monday 28 May 2012

Sophie's Vintage Quilt

I'd like to slowly create a record here of quilts I've finished over the years, so I'll take you slowly back in time over the next few posts.

Today's entry is a quilt I made for a friend's 50th birthday. Sophie loves vintage stuff and fabrics are some of her favourite vintage things, so when I came across Retro Age Fabrics online, but based in Melbourne (where she lives), I knew I'd find something that Sophie would like.  Because I was short of time and nervous about cutting up lovely old fabric and making a mess of it, not showing it off to its full potential, I decided to make a whole cloth quilt.



Sophie prefers blues and reds to browns and greys,  so the blue and black leaf floral 1940s dress cotton was perfect. I do like browns and greys and I thought the kona charcoal border set off the leaf print well.




If you look carefully in this picture you can see the tiny waffle texture of the leaf print.

I had some problems with the tension with the quilting- always seems to happen when it really matters for a gift and when there are time constraints... I tried fiddling with the tension, but that always seems to be a slippery slope to worse problems, luckily I'd noted where it was to start with, so I could unpick and get back to square one.  I'd decided to outline quilt around some (not all) of the leaves and I wanted to use a cream on the front, so it wouldn't show against the background and a grey on the back, since my quilting still needs more practice and wasn't going to be perfect, but there was no way I could get the threads to intersect in the middle of the quilt and I had to settle for pinpricks of white showing on the back. :-(  It was fine on the border where I used the same thread front and back to do some straight-line quilting.

I'd love to know if you've ever had this problem and how can I improve it? Perhaps the threads were different brands and that was the problem? Whenever I use the same colour thread front and back it never seems to be a problem, but maybe it just doesn't show as much??




I left the back plain except for an X paper pieced with the tiny remnants of the print and printed a label on to that fabric you can buy to print on.  I can't even remember properly what I did now, but I think I photocopied a piece of the kona charcoal to get the colour and then put the writing in a text box on top of that image and then printed it onto the natural colour cotton fabric. Something like that anyway!

I bound it in a tiny 1950s small circle and dot quilting weight cotton also bought from Retro Age. The dots are truly tiny, but the little touch of red gives a little lift to the edge.



Linking up with a new Link up Something Old Something New!

3 comments:

  1. I love all the repro vintage prints that are out at the moment and the blue leaf print you chose is really pretty. I love your leaf quilting too! Thanks for linking up :-)

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  2. Very cute - love the blues. I think my favorite part is the little cross on the back.

    Thank you so much for stopping by on my site....I had forgotten that I only used thumbnails way back when ;-) i updated the photos....even though they are a little grainy as they were taken with my iPhone.

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  3. Why is it so that we always seem to have hiccups when stitching a special quilt for a friend?? It happens to all of us!! Your quilt is beautiful......from the gorgeous vintage leaf print fabric, to the kona charcoal border, to the novel cross on the back and yes, finishing with your quilting......'tis gorgeous!!

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